Shorts, 11/30.

Brokeback Mountain is tackled from three angles in a Village Voice cover package this week. Gary Indiana goes broadest and deepest: "The insular quality of American life reinforces a stubborn naïveté about sexual matters that's been part of our national character from the outset. The hermetic communities pictured in Brokeback Mountain illustrate sociologist Kai T Erikson's findings in Wayward Puritans (1966) - that American communities have always defined themselves in terms of who doesn't belong in them."

Jessica Winter talks with Annie Proulx, who wrote the original 10K-word story that appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, and with Larry McMurtry, who co-wrote the screenplay with her and producer Diana Ossana: "We milked it for every single sentence, every single phrase we could."

"The western has always been the most idyllically homosocial of modes - and often one concerned with the programmatic exclusion of women," writes J Hoberman in the midst of a review that reveals him neither over- nor underwhelmed. Also, Paths of Glory: "[Y]ou have to wonder how it would play in Washington today, or Iraq."

And also in the Voice:

• Dennis Lim meets Joe Dante in Turin to talk about Homecoming, "easily one of the most important political films of the Bush II era." Says Dante: "Somebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. But everybody's afraid - it's uncommercial, people are going to be upset. Good, let them be upset. Why aren't people upset? Every minute, somebody's dying in this war, and for nothing. To establish a religious theocracy in Iraq? It doesn't seem to me quite worth it."

• Michael Atkinson on I Love Your Work, "a cold-serious, dead-air brood about how tough, lonely, and desolate it is being a celebrity." Also: "Le Samouraï has, in effect, been remade a thousand times—every impassive, hollowed-out, urban-man-of-violence movie made in the last 30 years owes it a drink."

• Ben Kenigsberg on Transamerica and The Kid & I, "both issue movies that encourage viewers to hug the outcasts in their midst."

• Georgia Christgau on the "unblinking documentary," Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt.

• Briefly: Hoberman on He Ran All the Way, Mark Peranson on Far Side of the Moon, Mark Holcomb on Little Man, Kenigsberg on Exist: Not a Protest Film, Matt Singer on Yours, Mine & Ours.

Far more than a profile, Carol Felsenthal's piece in Chicago on Roger Ebert is a pocket-sized biography: from childhood to the screenplays, the show and the paper, politics, romance, and most of all, work, work, work. Via Movie City News, where Leonard Klady talks with Bertrand Tavernier.

Matt Clayfield: Via Fred Camper at a_film_by, the Serge Daney in English blog, which 'attempts to keep track of all the english translations of texts by French film critic Serge Daney.'"

Dave Kehr: "As advertised, Match Point is indeed Woody Allen's most interesting film in a very long time – probably since Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), to which Match Point bears a chilly resemblance."

Anthony Kaufman's had a quick talk with David Cronenberg.

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post: "Years before he wrote On the Waterfront, before that film brought him an Oscar, and before he earned the ire of many colleagues by testifying during the Hollywood communist witch hunt, writer Budd Schulberg had the distinct honor of arresting Leni Riefenstahl." Via Anne Thompson.

Susan Orlean guest blogs at Powell's for a week: "One of you wisenheimers asked what I thought of the movie Adaptation, so, what the hell, I figure I might as well answer. I love the movie - it's hilarious and a remarkable commentary on the nature of writing and of passion itself." Also: Greil Marcus on No Direction Home.

Steven Barrie-Anthony drops in on a recording session for a future episode of The Simpsons. The guest voices: Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen and the only writer to survive the 20-odd minutes, Gore Vidal. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz and John Horn pick up where Nikki Finke left off in the LA Weekly: Marketing for Munich will indeed be very, very low-key.

Stephen Holden: "The Boys of Baraka is so rich that you wish there were more of it.... [T]he film's message is clear and pointed: If you take the boy out of the poor neighborhood, you stand a good chance of taking the despair and hopelessness of the poor neighborhood out of the boy." More from Laura Sinagra in the Voice. Also in the New York Times, Somini Sengupta reports from Pakistan: "The Melody Cinema had sat fallow for two years, ever since a mob of religious radicals set it on fire and reduced it to nothing more than a charred, trash-filled shell. Today, it has been reborn as the Melody Relief and Rehabilitation Center, and the occupants of its 53 beds are women with broken backs."

Gregory McNamee reviews Richard Schickel's Elia Kazan for the Hollywood Reporter.

In Fortune, and via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, Daniel Roth outlines why one corner of the industry carries on booming while the rest wring their hands and alienate (and sometimes infuriate) their customers:

[A]nime and manga firms have taken on forms very different from Hollywood studios or publishing houses. They more closely resemble the constantly updating startups of Silicon Valley. Their ethos is to get the product out to the right people - whether it's on a DVD or over a mobile phone or downloadable - and see what happens. If it succeeds, milk it; if not, try something different. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you.

For MSN, Sean Axmaker presents "the best of the director's cuts, the worst of the defective cuts and a few of the most interesting alternative versions available on DVD - and the stories behind them."

André Soares remembers Jocelyn Brando, 1919 - 2005.

Online viewing tip #1. Smith & Foulkes' ad for Motorola. Via Martha Fischer at Cinematical.

Online viewing tip #2. Fritz Lang's M. At the Internet Archive, via Wiley Wiggins, who's also pointing to Toe Stubber's collection of downloadable 60s and 70s-era radio spots for exploitation flicks.

Posted by dwhudson at November 30, 2005 2:49 PM